


oh, let's watch tomorrow go

by outlaw_baby



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Diplomacy, Established Relationship, F/F, Outer Space, Post-Canon, crystaltech post-colonialist heterophobic communist lesbian utopia, dealing with consequences of past evil acts, diplomatic missions in space!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27442417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlaw_baby/pseuds/outlaw_baby
Summary: Despite Glimmer spilling punch on half the Democratically Elected Communist Empress Gava’s elite council and Adora speaking primarily of swords for the better part of the night and Catra swindling an absurd amount of crystal currency she’ll never use from a crack lipped old woman, the night does not end in diplomatic disaster which must, Must be counted as some success.orA sunrise, a sunset. The BFS goes to a planet of giant crystal ladies to form diplomatic relations and fight colonialism and along the way they learns about love, eat some space pudding, and don't cause civil unrest!
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Bow/Glimmer (She-Ra)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	oh, let's watch tomorrow go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sheeana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/gifts).



> i've been thinking about neural nets and the shape of love recently.

Dawn.

Daybreak comes in a splintering of thickening red light through a million jagged crystals: a beauty ripped apart, growing again in a fragile wake of dawn and forgiving. 

Catra has learned since coming here that this crystalline planet has been shattered. Broken and made deadly, deadly to the brittle touch, deadly in the eye, when the people here thought they were worth more than destruction and carnage. To consume life and thus strengthen their own. Colonization they called it. They say it now like a curse wrought out in the very linings of their flesh, close, sacred, deadly. Sometimes things too beautiful to touch don’t seem to have much value if you’re wanting to tear everything apart, she thinks.

She has a lot of experience making blood soaked shard wreckage of a beautiful thing and she supposes on this planet of reforming gems she’s learning, too, how you can take the blood and wounded beauty and make something wonderful of it. 

Adora is asleep now, which is very unlike her; for the seven days they’ve spent on this planet she has barely slept a wink but then even the great She-Ra has limitations and a hippocampus that needs dreamful feeding. Catra basks, almost guilty, in the calm of a not-waking-Adora, of a quiet morning. Yesterday at this time Adora was already She-Ra loudly practicing placating greetings to a bedraggled and scratchy headed Catra waking up in a flurry of “How DO you do??”s and “That IS a Lovely sword ma’am”’s. She had replied, “Adora, they know you like their swords, they offered to make you one after your hundredth compliment, you can cool it on the fucking swords and I don’t know stop drooling.”

Which had caused Adora to panic about the diplomatic complexities of favortism displays through giant swords for giant ladies and Catra had sat there laughing at her and that time she almost forgot there was ever a time it wasn’t her, lounging, and Adora, stressing. Almost.

It’s a certain guilty clockwork that brings her always back to the carnage of it all. And there’s another thing which she cups in the wet beat of her heart, which says it was never like this, this is better. 

Now, Adora’s asleep and soft and even in the fractured dawn of this fractured planet she is beautiful and peaceful and snoring so softly which Catra will certainly bring up in front of a mildly important dignitary just to see her heat up and fumble over denial and indignation. She chuckles just to think of it and when Adora rustles she simply lets it all fade to a smile.

-

“Remind me again why the first planet we visit on our diplomatic mission to save the whole fucking universe had to be the Giant Ladies with Swords planet?”

It’s Glimmer who first asks this, a few days shy of landing, still on Darla, glaring at the holographic projections of the ambassadors they are about to meet while Adora ogles them with wide, wide eyes. 

And Bow replies, “It’s an easy, slow start, so we can figure things out. Who’s gonna love a giant lady with a sword trying to end colonialism more than giant ladies with swords trying to end colonialism!!”

After two weeks on a spaceship without anything but each other and space and time and space-time none of them look back at him with the same level of enthusiasm. Glimmer pats him on the cheek and Catra says, “Don’t worry Adora, even though they’re stronger than you and taller than you and have bigger swords than you, I’m sure your hair is the most flowy and sparkly.” 

Glimmer snorts but Adora isn’t listening because after the awe of giant ladies wore off she had self inflicted so much responsibility as to induce immobility which Catra reminds herself to lock away in a very-cute-Adora-panic-faces vault in her mind-folds because her expression just now is too good. Her eyes are so round as Catra sits in her lap and it must only be an impulse–from where, from when?–that Adora wraps her arms around Catra and sighs. 

Glimmer meanwhile is bouncing and making that face like she can’t fart and rambling ostensibly to Bow who has also rendered himself a husk fiddling with his tablet. “You think they’ll have magic? Bow, Bow you aren’t listening, you think I can teleport? Oh I better be able to fucking teleport or I’ll snap a crystal bitch in half. Bow are you listening?”

“Bow, the Glittery Diplomatic Incident on Two Legs needs your attention,” Catra says, reaching over a little and poking his bicep.

There is a loud crash and Glimmer says, “Whoops!” and then Bow is blinking

“W-what?” he says looking first at Catra, then, “What?! Glimmer what did you do?!"

Adora is alert again and confused because she’s holding Catra and that wasn’t happening before making herself catatonic. It’s all noise to Catra as Bow fusses with some ripped wires and Glimmer tries not to laugh and tries being apologetic without actually being apologetic and Adora is laughing just so deeply Catra is filled with the rumblings of her joy. Catra is in her arms and she wonders how after all this she managed to win. 

-

The giant ladies find She-Ra adorable, and maybe it’s for the best Adora is too swept up in sword admiration to notice she is quite literally child size to these women of shards and unblinking, crystal eyes. Despite being made entirely from crystal, in varying dazzling shades of reds and teals, they are bipedal and have jagged, crystalline muscles. Aside from being gleaming sexy crystal ladies Catra has no idea how this aspect of their anatomy has any practical purpose. 

They are impossible to look at sometimes, when the sun refracts their inner crystals and their guts are shown to be the pure essence of light, like chambers upon chambers of a house God built to live in. Catra reminds herself it’s where they keep their gross, disgusting chewed up….. whatever the fuck they eat. And that though they speak like wind happening upon a melody of words they are as human and fallible as even she, a former dictator herself aligning her guts with the light to resalvage the human and loving mush of herself...

Catra wonders what they eat, how guts can look so pristine, do they shit out crystals and plant them in their many crystal gardens? Now that they are using their large crystal hands to regrow their crystal planet into a heathy fuck load of crystals instead of a fractured fuck load of crystals, must they recycle even their shit to the ever frothing maw of the planet they rendered infantile? 

She shakes their smooth and surprisingly warm hands and doesn’t stare at their pointy crystal boobs, though Glimmer does, and they express to their small voyage of four the delights of rebuilding and communism. 

Glimmer, later will have lewd comments about putting crystals in unmentionable places and she says it only to Catra because it will only stress Adora out and Bow will look on her with a frown but together they laugh very much indeed.

-

Catra can hear her muttering as she is cooking, “Giant ladies- they love a giant lady- all to me- what if i can’t giantify-“ There is a slight shriek and Catra walks in to see Adora covered in flour and the now half empty bag is trembling in her hands.

“Don’t worry Adora if you can’t giantify you’ll just have to be small like me and Bow and Glimmer unless you really think that’s such shit.”

“Being small is- what? Giantify? I- Were you reading my mind?” And Adora looks a little too suspicious for comfort, her eyes narrowed. She’s a real idiot sometimes.

“You talk to yourself. You know how Double Trouble got most of their intel? Just stand around you long enough and you’ll mutter all your plans.”

“Do not.”

“Do too.”

Adora crosses her arms and glares, “What am I thinking now?”

“About me.”

Adora drops her jaw a little, “No.” Liar.

Catra crosses her arms and taps her foot, “What were you thinking of then?”

“Really important things.”

“Like me.”

“Well you are important,” Adora says, smirking in that way is more a smile.

“I’m traveling with the great and honored She-Ra, I suppose even a little nobody, former lord of evil has to be important.”

Adora frowns at her, her hands stuck halfway between the two of them in reaching, in stalling at something that still has to grow between them, and she says, “No you’re important to me because you’re Catra. And you’re important to Bow and Glimmer and this whole mission and this whole universe because you’re Catra.”

Catra smirks and cups her floury hand and leans up so they are nose to nose and she is slightly taller. “Well I hope you know you’re important because you’re Adora. Just Adora.”

It is a slow second of seeing each other, in the eyes of each other, frowning around mouths of things unsaid, things to be said. Just now, though, Adora kisses her.

Which is how they end up making out in the wreckage of Adora’s flour disaster and not making any semblance of dinner, well unless Adora’s sweet soft mouth counts but she keeps that privately to herself, hidden away in a smirk. 

And, later, to hear Glimmer roar, “THAT’S why we’re having crackers for dinner!!” after seeing the flour hand print on Adora’s butt is surely the height of the trip thus far and she notes that flirting with Adora while frazzled has all sorts of wonderful consequences. 

-

Their first night there is a respectable feast in which they are served the soft, round, and surprisingly edible, they are assured, roots of crystals. They taste of mushrooms and the cool, slick Earth and also some dark and sweet liquid which they lick greedily from their forks.

It seems the more powerful a woman you are the softer and more flowy your silk gown. The Democratically Elected Communist Empress Gava, the Teal Blooded, has impossible ripples of fabric making her hard, rigid body supple as a river as she moves, and her gowns traipse about dispassionately in her wake. 

This makes She-Ra an instant hit, as her cape has a magical billow built in, and her hair? Silk itself. Catra spends the night in the wake of her loud and slightly awkward laugh. Adora is always the center of a circle, as these giant ladies croon over her shimmering, flowing . And Catra is there too, her tangent. She makes small talk with the Democratically Elected Communist Empress Gava’s daughter and learns how to play a crystaltech form of poker with some older crystal ladies and she is always drifting as a satellite in the heat-sink gravity well of Adora. She follows like this so that, in the heat flushed center of circle upon circle, Adora can look up into her eyes with fear and concern and she, Catra, can give her a smirk and a wink and an obnoxious thumbs up for all that her love and trust is worth. Based on how much she treasures Adora’s return smile it must be worth quite a bit. 

And Glimmer spends the night alternatively going to the bathroom, from too much punch, and offering to get any diplomat within ear shot punch just so she can teleport over, inevitably slosh punch on some fine silked emissary, and teleport back. And Bow finds himself gaping and gawping as the rougher silked crowd of techies explain how crystaltech can simulate a quantum neural net which is currently controlling re-cyrstalization efforts on the surface (more connections than any human brain and with sophisticated enough backprop to regenerate and maintain its own weight parameters to control for real time weather conditions, he will tell them with enthusiasm). 

Despite Glimmer spilling punch on half the Democratically Elected Communist Empress Gava’s elite council and Adora speaking primarily of swords for the better part of the night and Catra swindling an absurd amount of crystal currency she’ll never use from a crack lipped old woman, the night does not end in diplomatic disaster which must, Must be counted as some success. 

-

It is under a purple tinged glow, Darla’s glitzy approximation of sunset to make sure their planet bound bodies don't unfurl without the changing light of a life giving source, that Adora snaps, a little.

“You’re not taking this seriously!”

Catra stands so they are eye level, nearly nose to nose, and she is sure to growl. “If I wasn’t taking this seriously I wouldn’t be here. Trust me, you’re great and all but I wouldn’t lock myself in an old flying triangle with Princess Bossy and Arrow Dork for weeks on end if I didn’t actually think this was important.” Adora has her hands in balled fists and oh it’s so cute her little hair floof is falling out of her ponytail. Catra bats it absently and adds, “My taking shit seriously just doesn’t involve being an uptight idiot.”

“Well, no, but, no, but Catra the notecards, Catra put those down I need those.”

Catra has, in her hand, Adora’s trivia notecards and she’s holding them far out of Adora’s reach. “Tomorrow. You need to sleep or else what good will you be?”

“Plenty good,” Adora says pitifully, pouting.

“No, Adora, you won’t be. I will quiz you once more, and only once, and then we’re sleeping for as long as you can take it without exploding and then we'll make breakfast because you don’t know what spices are. Got it?”

“Catra, this isn’t a game-“

“Or I could just rip your precious notecards?”

“Fine! Fine! I’ll go to sleep or whatever,” Adora says with a particular hmph in ‘whatever’. 

And that night she dozes between the small enclosure of Catra’s arms and it is all wonderful to know Catra has put her there. With Adora's soft snores it is as if she has built a home.

-

Apparently there used to be men here but along with terraforming the Earth to build now cracked and brittle bloody skyscrapers and making whimpering crystal mash of the natural shard plains, the women here had also cracked men open like eggs for a deliciously self serving omelette. They treat Bow with caution, as such, tap him only gently as if latent genocide in their touch might shatter him too. They are only ever outwardly shocked when they find out Glimmer and Bow are dating and this is unimaginable as even when men walked instead of sprouted their fledgling heads from a dirt these women now try to tend with care, well there was never much condoned inter-relationship between them. Except in raunchy dramas Glimmer is sure to make them all watch, cackling loudly. 

On their last day, they take Bow, even though he is a man of blood and not death, to the hard dirt fields that serve as their womb, cradling the buds of their new crystal lives and because he is Bow he cries and Glimmer holds him and these tall women look out upon their own destruction with a thing like tenderness, trying to make love grow again.

She takes Adora’s hand and today, on the fifth day of their landing she is just Adora as she always has been, thin in the fingers and wide in the eyes, Adora in her hand.

And she thinks of fields and fields of things gone wrong. Things to right again. Today she starts by patting Bow’s shoulder and later telling Glimmer a joke that nearly makes her pee herself and negotiating fuel and food and star maps while everyone else is busy smiling and eating thick black puddings that wobble in spoons. And later they will sit together in Darla around some crystaline space jelly and thank her and she’ll make a crack about poisoning them and she will be poisoning them, so ever slowly, with her, Catra, Prime’s Greatest Fuck Up, poisoning them with loving her until their blood mixes as in communion and they’ll all be at home in the galaxy of everything they’ve ever been.

-

On bad space days she wonders if they will die like this, in the stars, a spinning gut filled mess of triangular death to splutter through the unending spool of stars. Most days she holds Adora’s hand and revels in their ability to always find a way home. 

-

Dusk.

They have lived in these woods of turning, moving secrets, for two years and every day a new little thing has changed before their eyes. One day they found a fresh patch of carrots ripe for their picking pleasure. One day they found a dead bird with maggots for eyes and a gory bloody hole with a mushroom grow through her stomach. Each day is new. 

Sometimes their children visit and they eat from wooden bowls and hear of a world they helped build, which seems these days a receding skyline of tall structures and rushing machines. The woods seems to be pushing them ever farther away as they age and wilt. In the evenings, on their porch, holding hands as if in young love, they watch the lights of a place, so distant from their home, further consume the stars they swore to protect. 

Adora hasn’t been She-Ra in years. And some nights Catra can see her thinking of it, thinking of being big and strong, sure, but also of being the one thing needed to save them all. She won’t die a martyr and Catra has made sure of it but it’s an old argument, playing out over many years and many losses, that seems to catch Adora in a vulnerable star tinged second of wondering if her destiny had been forgotten and lost up there in the space rubble. 

But on these nights Catra cradles her hands and speaks of their children and Adora, so filled always with the surprise of love and living, softens to know what her destiny has become instead.

**Author's Note:**

> these crystal women spawned in my brain fully formed. the molecular structure of a crystal is so regimented it is a fine little box however I think their brains are spinning crystal connections amorphously linking to form thought. they are proud lesbians with a rocky relationship with colonization (much to think on there ladies) and they are trying to breed new post-colonial life with a praxis of love and growth. i thought this might be an interesting parallel to catra's growth and the kind of under studied redemptive process she has to go through.
> 
> thank u Sheeana for ur prompts i do hope u enjoy
> 
> title from Smart by Girl in a Coma which I found an apt vibe for this


End file.
